We were lucky to get two weeks away on the boat this summer and we decided to head north. Our first day was a big one, we left at 6am, motored to Porlier Pass (~2.5 hours) and then sailed for another 7.5 hours all the way to Jedidiah Island. Â Jedidiah is home to several old abandoned buildings and orchards, some feral sheep and goats, and an infinite number of mosquitos. Here we are on our first night there : …
It’s been a jam-packed summer (much like this blog post is going to be!) and here are a few highlights: We had such a good time in the San Juans last year that we went back for another week. Here’s Nyah botanizing at Sucia Island. Salt Spring also had a music festival!  The adults enjoyed watching a slate of great bands . . . . . . while the kids mostly ran around the field in packs. Construction…
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here!  So long that I’m not even going to try to make this an update, but instead I’ll just start with this weekend and move forward from here. Never look back they say! We spent this weekend in Winter Cove, Saturna Island, which is truly a lovely place.  We didn’t mean to go there, but when we set sail friday evening there was such a nice northwesterly blowing that we didn’t want to…
At the beginning of August we went to the San Juan Islands for 10 days. Â We’d never been before, but we had a great time and we’ll certainly go back. We hit the beach a lot, hiked, explored some rocks and caves, Â We stopped in Friday Harbour for a night to see the big city, fill up on ice cream, and re-stock on fruits and veggies before we got scurvy (you can’t bring most produce across the border). Â While…
We spent the remembrance day long weekend out sailing with our friends on Rampart. The weather was beautiful and clear, but cold! there was frost on the decks soon after the sun went down and we had to run our diesel fireplace all night. However, we bundled up and had a great time, we went to the beach, visited back and forth between boats, and even did a bit of sailing. Here’s the crew on iceberg watch Sunset sail (at…
Well this blog was sorely neglected, but we’ve had a great summer. We moved back aboard the boat for 3 months and also moved from Gabriola to Salt Spring Island. We sailed quite a bit, short one-night trips mostly, but we made an effort to look super cool when we were out there, and we took some friends, and we always ate a lot of snacks. Summer baths were had in the cockpit (Where Nyah did her best Astro-Boy impression)….
We’ve never been to Montague harbour, so now that it’s only an hour and a bit from our home port we decided to hop over there for the weekend. We woke up Saturday morning and headed out, the advantages of being back aboard for the summer! We found a private beach, where Nyah tried to follow Doug out on a limb, with eventual success. Our sweet ride. When we got back aboard West spent considerable time making the perfect nest…
Way back in September we decided that since our family had suddenly doubled in size we would need a new dinghy. Unfortunately we wanted it all, something both big (enough for all 4 of us) and small (enough to be easily lifted and stored aboard), something cheap (in dollars) and high end (in construction). The laws of both physics and economics were against us. Nothing fit the bill until Doug got the idea that we would build a nesting dinghy….
This past weekend we had a little holiday down to Saltspring on the boat. Despite being nervous about how the kids would handle it, everything went really well. They slept ok, they even napped, and they were fine with 5 hours of boat travel each way. On the way down we had to motor and the kids enjoyed being out in the cockpit. This crew member enjoyed it so much that despite getting very sleepy (maybe it was the 5am…
We decided to try our luck at prawning again yesterday. This time we dropped the trap just before lunch and went back out to pick it up just before dinner. We figured that the number of prawns caught would scale linearly with the time the trap was down, giving us 62.5 prawns for a 5 hour set. Actually, to be honest, we expected more like 100 prawns since we reckoned that for the first hour word was just getting around…